I would be pleased to have a CD of your early works. I
would show them inmy classes on the history of video art. As for finding a
host on the Web,the only possibility I'm aware of is the Art and Science
Laboratory (theVasulkas), and what they post on their site is not my
decision but theirs.I would certainly show your work to
them.

Pierre Restany - one of
Europe's most respected art critics - wrote that unfortunately he was unable to
attend the whole event because of a journey to South America, but had to settle
for the last few days:

I was also
struck by his acute instincts, his poetic use of the technology of the mass-medium - an
iconographic liberation on the level of information technology - all in the language of the masses.

Sjolander's
works of art,
which combine art and technology, become an attempt to preserve our poetic
survival.

It is a
truly humane, or rather humanistic achievement, in the modern sense of the
word."

- Pierre
Restany

Mo Rothman

5 Eaton Place,

LONDON, SWIX 8BN

March 8, 1974

Mr. Ture Sjolander

Valhallavagen 147

S-115 31 Stockholm

Sweden

Dear Ture:

I am sorry I was out when you called about Allan Stone,
but I have heard nothing from his side and assume that he will eventually, and
hopefully, come up with the sale of the portfolios. In the interim, I am
formally requesting you to turn over to Bertil Ohlsson all of the canvasses that
were made, including the one bering Charles Chaplin's signature. As you know,
the canvasses were not included in our contract anf these are by special
permission of the Chaplin's personally, so that I bear the moral, legal and
ethical responsibility to ensure that these are not disposed of, loaned or in
any way handled until such time as we get a formal offer for them which I can
transmit to the Chaplins, and then incorporate in our Master
contract.

I would therefore feel far more comfortable if they were
in Bertil Ohlsson's office, and would very much appreciate you complying with
this request immediately.

With all good wishes

MO ROTHMAN

cc: Mr. Bertil Ohlsson

original letter typed on
goatskin

Professor
emeritus

Ake Daun

wrote in the paper Folket, on the
29th of March, 1963:

"He calls himself a photo-graphic artist,

a union of photographer and graphic artist.

He has successfully managed - it sounds
like a dream - to combine photographic methods with free artistic
creativity.

From this technological platform, Sjolander takes
us

along on trips to reality, but along other roads

than the ones we have tread
before."

In the afternoon paper Expressen,
Katja Walden wrote 1965 ;

" the artist has reached his goal, already
when we react,

when something
happens between us
and the photograph.

After Ulf Linde, in the year of pop art and a
couple of months

after the New York-nights,
everything is still possible.

Ture Sjolander has made something happen in
the area of photography."

The publishing firm
Nordisk Rotogravyr published a so-called expo-book, with pictures from the
exhibition.

Erland Törngren wrote in the paper
Arbetaren 1964 ;

"His images make most of what we saw the other
year, at the ambitious exhibition

'Swedish people as seen by 11 photographers,' look
medieval.

'You have been photographed' is one the
bravest attempts of a coup,

one of the boldest opening moves,
that has ever hit
Swedish photography."

On April 24, 1965, in the paper Kvällsposten Malmo, Sjolander
asked:

"Why
do pictures have to be translated into words?"

On July 6, 1965, Bengt Olvång wrote in
the morning paper Stockholms Tidningen:

"Ture Sjolander's television appearance is characterised by a warm
humaneness and a bizarre, uproarious sense of humour. One of its most 'shocking'
features is composed of a grand piece of Vivaldi music, illustrated by a little
boy who is picking his nose. However, what is really most shocking, is the way
in which the Broadcasting Corporation is acting. Heads of department become
self-appointed censors, and in the name of 'The Swedish People', they erase
program features, such as Sjolander's TV film. The thought of letting opinions
and values develop freely is totally foreign to them. The broadcasting monopoly
watches over people's opinions and hinders all attempts at moving in any radical
direction."

Jonas Sima
wrote in the morning paper Stockholms Tidningen, on October 23, 1965:

"Sjolander
also has opinions and a social temperament.

He
has produced the kind of film I want to watch - and produce."

On October 28, 1965, Mauritz Edström wrote in
the morning paper Dagens Nyheter:

"He is
simply testing our attitudes in relation to the photography, by placing it in
unexpected contexts. When he places his enlargements on billboards and then
films them, the result is really challenging: what resources of expression can't
we find lying idle under the old cobweb of conventional views on
pictures!"

Alf Nordström

of the morning paper Dagens
Nyheter wrote 1964:

"All those who like pretty
and well-behaved photo-art are seriously warned

against having a closer look at
this exhibition.

It offers howls and grimaces,
cross-eyed faces and horror studies of the female flesh.

Professor Dr. Bjorn Hallstrom, TIME, 1976 In the short history of video animation the
Swedish artists TURE SJOLANDER and BROR WIKSTROM are the pioneers. Their
television art programme TIME (1965 - 1966) seems to be the first
distortion of video-scan-line rasters achieved by applying tones from wave
form generators.

For almost ten years they have been
using electronic image-making equipment for a non-traditional statement.
It must be kept in mind, however that SJOLANDER and WIKSTROM have a
traditional and solid artistic background. Howard Klein likens the
relationship between the video artist and his hardware to that between
Ingres and the graphite pencil. It should be added that real artists like
SJOLANDER and WIKSTROM have a natural relationship to any image-making
equipment. In that respect they differ from most cameramen and tape makers
and they may come back some day as pioneers in other fields of art.

In fact they have already surpassed the
limits of video and TV using the electronic hardware to produce pictures
which can be applied as prints, wall paintings and tapestries.

They have generously provided new
possibilities to other artists, they are not working alone on a monument
of their own.

It is significant that the Royal
Swedish Academy of Fine Arts has decided to support SJOLANDER and WIKSTROM
financially.

We live at a time when borders between
the art forms are constantly being redrawn or abolished. Poets arrange
their poems as pictorial compositions or record spoken sequences of sound
which can hardly be distinguished from musique concrète. Composers are
able to build a complete composition around the manipulation of a spoken
voice. Artists sometimes create pictures by striking off newspaper
photographs or mixing conglomerates of discarded objects and painted areas
into something which is neither picture nor sculpture. Puppet theatre is
performed by setting mobiles in motion in the constantly changing light
effects on a stage.

The border between photography and
painting is no longer clear, either, and it is easy to understand why this
is so. Tinguély, the creator of mobiles, started out by making a form of
reliefs with moving parts, powered by a machine placed at the back of
them. After a while Tinguély began to wonder why he could not equally well
show the play of cog wheels and driving belts at the rear and let
Amachine" and Ashapes" become a united whole.

Similarly, some photographers have
asked themselves why the action of light on photo paper and the
development baths could not become a creative process comparable with the
exposure of a motif C why camera work and darkroom work could not become
one.

Among those photographers we find Ture
Sjölander. Among those photo graphic artists, as he calls them, who feel
dissatisfied with the dialectic of the traditional photographer's
relationship to his motif: when he searches for his motif, he is the
sovereign master of it, choosing and rejecting it C. At the very moment
that he touches the trigger, he has become enslaved to the motif, without
any possibility (other than in terms of light gradation) to do what a
painter does C reshape, exclude, and emphasize in the motif.

This subjection to the motif does not
have to be disrupted by eliminating the motif. The photographer simply
needs to remove the limits to what is permitted and what is not
allowed. To let the copy of a photo remain in the water bath for an hour
is allowed (if you want to keep the motif). But leaving it there for a
couple of days is the right thing as well (if you want to let the
motif diffuse into deformations soft and silky as fur). Scratching with a
needle or a razor blade is making accidents with scratches into a virtue C
and so on.

In addition, there is the chance of
manipulating a figurative or non-figurative motif by copying different
pictorial elements into it, by enlargements which elevate previously
imperceptible structures to the visible level, even up to monumental
dimensions. The tension between scratching lines of light into a
developed (black) negative the size of a matchbox and enlarging it on the
Agfa papers the size of a bed sheet. This is where the photographer has at
his command tricks of his art which the painter lacks, or at any
rate seldom uses.

But on the other hand, is the
photographer able freely to experiment with the colour? Yes, he is C if he
brushes paint on to the negative and makes a colour copy.

He may also, like Ture Sjölander,
brush, pour, draw etc. on a photo paper C possibly with a background
copied on to it C with water, developing or fixing sodium thiosulphite
solutions, ferrocyanide of potassium and other liquids. In that case the
result is a single, once-only, art work. In this way he is able to
achieve a tempered and melting colour scale of white, sepia, ochre,
thunder cloud grey, verdigris, silver and possibly also certain blue and
red tones.

In this area, however, it seems
everything still remains to be done C but one single photographer's
resources are not enough for the experiments to be conducted widely and in
depth. Sweden has recently inaugurated its first studio of electronic
music.

When will photographers and painters be
given the opportunity to explore this no-man's-land between their
time-honoured frontlines?

But can photography, in principle, be
equal to painting? Is not the glossy, non-handmade character of the photo
an obstacle? People have argued in a similar way about enamel work, but
that technique is now recognised as totally and completely of a kind
with the painted picture. If we adjust the focus of the Aconventional
painting concept" when we are looking at photo

painting, we will perchance discover
that in its singular immaterial quality it can possess new and suggestive
value.

Öyvind Fahlström Stockholm,
1961.

Translation from Swedish by Birgitta Sharpe

Letter from: RUTT
ELECTROPHYSICS, March 12, 1974

Signed by Sherman Price.

To: International Section of Swedish National
Television, Stockholm, Sweden.

Extracts;

I am writing a detailed magazine article about the
history of video animation.

From literature avaiable I gather that a videofilm
program, "MONUMENT", broadcast in Stockholm in January,1968, was the first
distortion of video scan-line rasters achieved by applying tones from wave
form generators.

This is of such great importance - historically -
that I would like to obtain more detailed documentation of the program and
of the electronic circuitry employed to manipulate the video images.

I understand from your New York office that there
may have been a brochure or booklet published about the program.

I will be happy to pay any expense for
publications, photcopies or other documents about the program and its
production -particulary with regard to the method of modulating the
deflection voltage in the flying-spot telecine used.

AVideo synthesis" is becoming a prominent technique
in TV production here in the United States, and I think it will be
interesting to give credit to your broadcasting system and personal for
achieving this historic innovation.

Sherman Price

Letter from
the Manager of THE PINK FLOYD, 1967

Stockholm, Septembre 11th 1967.

Dear Messrs Sjolander & Weck,

Having seen your interesting Stockholm exhibition of portraits of the
King of Sweden made with advanced electronic techniques I have been
struck by the connection between this new type of image creating and
the music-and-light art presented by The Pink Floyd.

I think that your work could and should be linked
with the music of The Pink Floyd in a television production, and I
would like to suggest that we start arranging the practical details for
such a production immedialtely. With all his experiences from filming in
the USA and elsewhere I also feel that Mr. Lars Swanberg is the ideal man
tp help us made the film.

Please get in touch as soon as possible. Yours
sincerely Andrew King

Kristian
Romare, Monument, 1968

The following text was written by the Swedish Art
Writer KRISTIAN ROMARE 1968.

We create pictures. We
form conceptions of all the objects of our experience. When talking to
each other our conversation emerges in the form of descriptions. In that
way we understand one another.

Instantaneous communication in all directions. Our
world in television! The world in image and the image in the world: at the
same moment, in the consciousness and in the eyes of millions.

The true multi-images is not substance but
process-interplay between people.

"Photography freed us from old concepts",
said the artist Matisse. For the first time it showed us the object freed
from emotion.

Likewise satellites showed us for the first
time the image of the earth from the outside. Art abandoned representation
for the transformational and constructional process of depiction, and
Marcel Duchamp shifted our attention to the image-observer relation.

That, too, was perhaps like viewing a planet
from the outside. Meta-art: observing art from the outside. That awareness
has been driben further. The function of an artist is more and more
becoming like that of a creative revisor, investigator and transformer of
communication and our awareness of them.

Multi-art was an attempt to widen the circulation
of artist's individual pictures. But a radical multi-art should not, of
course, stop the mass production of works of art: it should proceed
towards an artistic development of the mass-image.

MONUMENT is such a step. What has compelled
TURE SJOLANDER and LARS WECK is not so much a technical curiosity as a
need to develop a widened, pictorially communicative awareness.

They can advance the effort further in other
directions. But here they have manipulated the electronic transformations
of the telecine and the identifications triggered in us by well-known
faces, our monuments. They are focal points. Every translation influences
our perception. In our vision the optical image is rectified by
inversion. The electronic translation represented by the television image
contains numerous deformations, which the technicians with their
instruments and the viewers by adjusting their sets usually collaborate in
rendering unnoticeable.

MONUMENT makes these visible, uses them as
instruments, renders the television image itself visible in a new way. And
suddenly there is an image-generator, which - fully exploited - would be
able to fill galleries and supply entire pattern factories with fantastic
visual abstractions and ornaments.

Utterly beyond human imagination.

SJOLANDER and WECK have made silkscreen pictures
from film frames. These stills are visual. But with television, screen
images move and effect us as mimics, gestures, convultions. With
remarkable pleasure we sense pulse and breathing in the electronic
movement. The images become irradiated reliefs and contours, ever
changing as they are traced by the electronic finger of the telecine.

With their production, MONUMENT, SJOLANDER and WECK
have demonstrated what has also been maintained by Marshall McLuhan:
that the medium of television is tactile and sculptural.

The Foundation for MONUMENT was the fact that
television, as no other medium, draws the viewers into an intimate
co-creativity. A maximum of identification - the Swedish King, The
Beatles, Chaplin, Picasso,
Hitler etc, - and a maximum of deformation.

A language that engages our total instinct for
abstraction and recognition.

"Who, in fact, knows
anything about pictures? And why do we understand so little about visual
semantics? Photography and motion pictures have existed for 100 years,
television for 50. Despite this, pictures have not attained more than a purely
illustrative function. Why? Probably, because most of our pictures are created
by Word people. In fact, roughly half the items on TV today could just as well
be broadcast on radio instead." This is a quotation from a paper "The impact of
New Technology on the Development of Culture" presented by Ture Sjölander at the

For the creation of paintings, works of graphic art, free-standing
sculptures and reliefs there is a fairly limited number of materials and
techniques; these have changed relatively little during the last 300
years.

Even though new materials and methods have developed, the artistic
techniques in the areas of painting, graphic arts and sculpture have kept their
traditional character. A painting on canvas today has a technical structure
largely similar to that of a seventeenth century painting.

The possibility of giving pictorial expression to the artist's message is
however not tied to traditional methods. For the majority of people in the
industrial countries, television, video newspapers and advertising have become
the dominant transmitters of pictures and visual images. Television and video in
particular have come to extend more and more widely through the global
development of distribution systems, and are frequently used as a medium for
other art forms, such as film, theatre and pictorial arts.

In this context it should be emphasised that it is journalists, above
all, who have been recruited to these areas and who have therefore had an
opportunity of exploiting the particular and specialised resources which
television and video have at their disposal. The fact that pictorial artists
occupy a subordinate position would seem partly to be connected with the fact
that art schools still limit their educational role to the traditional creation
of static images.

2. THE CREATION OF ELECTRONIC IMAGES

The work of artistic/technical development presupposes that artists have
access to specialised technical studio equipment.

Television has been in existence now for almost 50 years. During this
period a significant number of cultural programmes have been made by artists.
Very rarely, however, have these artists produced works directly
intended/designed for this medium. Although television per se is a
pictorial medium, it has primarily been used to transmit words. The stress has
been laid on 'tele' or the transporting/transmitting aspects of the medium, and
comparatively little attention has been paid to the conceptual element of
'vision'; that is to say those aspects having to do with the language of the
images themselves.

If one looks back on the history of art and makes comparisons with the
visual aesthetics used in television today, one is struck be the fact that the
greater proportion of all television production today uses visual aesthetics
dating back to the 16th century. As an example we may mention the aesthetics of
Cubism: this implied a visualisation of several different points of view being
given simultaneous expression and coinciding with the discoveries by modern
physics of Time and Space being only relative and not absolutely fixed
structures.

Cubism dates back more than 50 years, and yet, in a television programme
a few years ago it would be unthinkable to use Cubist visual
aesthetics.

MEDIA DEVELOPMENT AND COMPUTER COMMUNICATION

This situation is however changing rapidly at the present moment. During
the last decades or so, a series of international artists have initiated the
construction of elctronic image laboratories, where they pursue the development
of new art forms through experimental techniques.

Those internatinal artists who have access to modern electronic
technology have been given the opportunity of realising, by a creative process,
their ideas concerning a truly visually-oriented language. Artists with many
different points of view and modes of expression have begun working with
computer/electronics/video, taking their point of departure in their previous
knowledge and training. Painters, sculptors, musicians, photographers,
composers, choreographers and others have approached this medium with their
own particular talents and creative methodology and all have contributed to
media development in the area of television film and video and to a
visual language characterised by greater awareness and creativity.

International electronic music studios have conducted its work of
development in music for nearly 30 years, those artists who have been engaged in
similar work within the visual arts field are mostly still obliged to manage
completely without any corresponding access to electronic equipment.

In a number of countries considerable sums have been invested, for many
years, in facilities for practical experimentation in both the visual and audio
areas.

THE ARTIST AS DESIGN SCIENTIST

The creation of electronic images (sometimes called 'video art'), is an
artistic development of visual language. Modern 'electronics' can convert sound
vibrations into visual structures, and image components into patterns of sound,
thereby giving visual expression to basic processes such as growth and change.
The essential definition of 'video art' is based on the manipulation of video
signals. Apart from the use of video to realise a series of images in a temporal
sequence, artists can also exploit television as a physical, sculptural, object.
At galleries they make 'installations' or 'environments' by placing one or more
monitors or giant screen projections in specific, related positions. Video
cameras, too, 'incorporate' the spectator into the work. In this way, it is
possible to explore perceptions of what is seen, as well as the psychology of
seeing, in a living context.

An electronic image laboratory, however, should not be limited to video.
Another related area is the so-called computer animation (computer-assisted
and/or computer-generated images). This technique is based on advanced forms of
programming and opens up hiterto unimagined possibilities of free-image
composition.

With the aid of electronics and laser the static image, too, will have an
interesting development in the fields of painting and graphic arts. Attempts in
this direction have been demonstrated in the form of 'video paintings', or more
precisely, electronic painting and computer art.

WORD PICTURES

Those who claim that we live today in a visually oriented culture are
probably word-blind. Today's visual art and visual media, with the possible
exception of painting, still bear a master-slave relationship to elite
literature and popular journalism - in the beginning was the Word. The word is
power. People who can express themselves well and forcefully in speech and
writing, more or less automatically achieve positions of power... while people
who express themselves well in pictures, must often support themselves through
stipends and other grants.

The producers of words dominate the cultural columns of newspapers,
control official cultural policy and the most important visual media. And
generally exert a damnably important influence on society. The arts in Sweden
are infested by the speech chorus and the clatter of typewriters. Authors write
screenplays and become film directors. Journalists become television producers
(or programme directors) and make TV-films. Our entire culture is beset by
word-producers. Authors, journalists, investigators, letter-writers, polemicists
and critics. Who, in fact, knows anything about pictures? And why do we
understand so little about visual semantics? Photography and motion pictures
have existed for 100 years, television for 50. Despite this, pictures have not
attained more than a purely illustrative function. Why? Probably, because most
of our pictures are created by Word-people. In fact, roughly half the items on
TV today could just as well be broadcast on radio instead.

Ture Sjölander 1973

Ture Sjolander (b. 1937) has become known as
an experimental photographer and avant-garde artist. He made his artistic debut
in 1961, with a solo exhibition at the Sundsvall Museum. Unlike many artists
presented here, there is some documentation on Sjolander. In the magazine
Konstrevy (1:1963), there is detailed presentation of him, as well as in
Aktuell Fotografi (12:1977). The earlier presentation was written after
the exhibition at the Gallery Observatiorium with Lars Hillersberg
ochUlf Rahmberg, at a time when Sjolander has just established
himself as an artist. In the same year, he participated in a group exhibition at
the White Chapel Art Gallery in London, and also qualified himself for the
Swedish Government Artist Grant (Statens Konstnärsstipendium) and the Stockholm
City Cultural Grant (Stockholms Stads Kulturstipendium). The article from 1977,
was written after Sjolander had designed a big tapestry based on his own
ABBA-photographs, for Polar Music AB.

Sjolander was a pioneer in
what came to be known as "new media". In his preface to the exhibition in
Sundsvall, Öyvind Fahlström wrote: To the photo-graphic artists, as he calls those who feel
dissatisfied with the dialectics of the traditional photographer's relationship
with his motif: when he looks around for the motif, he is its superb master, in
command of every choice. But at the exact moment when he presses the button, he
has already turned into a slave of the motif, and he no longer has the painter's
freedom to rearrange, exclude or accentuate anything in his picture - other than
in a strictly limited way. (FromÖyvind Fahlström's preface to the exhibition in 1961, "On the photo-graphic art of
Ture Sjolander".)

In 1964, much was
written about Ture Sjolander in connection with his exhibition "You have been
photographed", at the Karlsson Gallery (19-24 - 11-13). It is likely that this
controversial exhibition gave the gallery its place as one of Stockholm's most
influential galleries in the domains of political art, as well as in sub- and
counterculture. At the time of Sjolander's exhibition, many people (among them
Ulf Hård af Segerstad) voiced criticism against this seemingly dadaistic
version of photography. In the same year, another acquaintance from Sundsvall,
Sven Inge de Monér, exhibited his works at the Gallery Karlsson. Along with another artist, Bror Wikström, Sjolander and de Moner began working
together on various projects in the 1960's. The three men were interested in
electronic experiments and Sjolander's contacts with the Swedish Broadcasting
Corporation proved crucial. Sjolander does not want to describe the 1960's as a
revolutionary time, but rather as a re-evolutionary one. Later on, he has
explained how he, as an artist, tried to work with different types of
techniques. An example of this can be seen in the films Time and Monument.
They have been broadcasted on Swedish television, and have also received attention abroad. He was a
driving force in the "multi-art" project, which was led by Kristian Romare, the
producer of Monument. This is what Rune Jonsson writes about it in 1977:
"In the news program Aktuellt, Ulf Thorén showed part of
the exhibition, and Sjolander coined the following expression: "I want to
exhibit, not to inhibit" [ om man skall ställa ut så
skall man ju inte ställa in] . Some 10,000 visitors
came to the exhibition during the two weeks that it was on. Many of the viewers
were attracted by the television news-program and this made Sjolander think
about new ways of distributing visual art. It should be possible to attract more
visitors with the help of television and outdoor exhibitions. ("Ture Sjolander,
a revolutionary in Swedish photography," Aktuell Fotografi 12:1977).

Ture Sjolander was
widely noticed for his artistic activities in the 1960's. The experimental films
Time and Monument were to be his most successful pieces of work in the 1960's.
Included in his more recent projects, is Video Nu (Video Now) in Stockholm. He
was again in the public eye in the 1970's, for taking the first colour photos of
Greta Garbo and using Charlie Chaplin as a model. Ture Sjolander now lives and
works in Australia.

On an island aptly named Magnetic Island off the coast of Australia, a
Swedish artist lives in exile. Just like so many others in today's
media-landscape, he was first praised and then brought to dust. However, he has
left a lasting imprint on the world. As early as the 1960's, he made the first
electronic animation. Had he been an inventor, he would have been celebrated as
a genius today, but because he is a predecessor in the world of art, things are
different. In that world, the great ones often have to die before they are
recognized.

We all know how Disney's famous cartoons were made: thousands of drawings,
filmed in sequence. Even today some films are made this way. However, electronic
animation has opened up a new world within the film industry and it has also
made computer games and countless graphic solutions possible in business and
science.

Pixar, which used to be part of Lucasfilm and then sold to Steve Jobs in the
lat 1980's, made the first completely computer animated film called "Andre and
Wally B" in 1983. The first feature length fully animated movie was Toy Story
from 1995. It was made by Pixar and distributed by Disney. Disney had already
started to use computer animation in Little Mermaid from 1989, and then on
through Aladdin, Lion King, Pocahontas, etc In those fantastic movies the
pictures were however first drawn on paper and then scanned into computers for
painting and cleanup and superimposition over painted
backgrounds.

Decades earlier, in 1963 Nam June Paik Paik and Wolf Vostell
presented the earliest experiments with distorted TV-images. They placed
thirteen televisions prepared for the distortion of images on the floor among
many other objects at the Parnass Gallery in Wuppertal. This "event" is
retrospectively identified as the beginning of video art.

From 1965-1968, Nam June Paik and Yud Yalkut work with the first experimental
creation of electronic images, based on the manipulation of transistors and
resistors of a television set, with what was called a video synthesizer. These
abstract images - waving, and swinging and changing colour, surging forth at
random as a result of maladjustment  show that a monitor can also be an
instrument and not just a simple receiver of images. Their esperiments were
first shown in 1971.

Already in 1965, Ture
Sjolanders electronically manipulated images were broadcasted by
the Swedish Television (SVT) and later by other TV-stations in
Europe. Among other things, Ture Sjolander was experimenting with the
question of how much the portrait of a person could be changed before it was
unrecognizable, something which has pioneered the amazing morph-technique that
is used today.

Gene Youngblood, who, alongside with Marshall McLuchan, is the most
celebrated media-philosopher of the era, devoted a whole chapter in his book
Expanded
Cinema, 1970, (Pre face by Buckminster-Fuller) to the
experiments of the SVT.
Expanded cinema means transgression of conventions as well as mind-expanding
transgressions and new definitions. Sjolanders broadcasts were not technically
sophisticated, but they were ground-breaking.

The film mentioned by Youngblood is "Monument" (1968) by
Ture Sjolander and
Lars Weck. The other televised pioneering
animations were "TIME" (1965/66) by Ture Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom and
"Space In the Brain" (1969) by Ture Sjolander, Bror Wikstrom, Sven Hoglund and
Lasse Svanberg. Whereas most of the modern-day artists fade into oblivion, Ture
Sjolander has found his place in the art history by the making of those films.

Ture, a lad from the northern city of Sundsvall, had instant success with his
opening exhibition at the Sundsvalls Museum 1961. He moved to Stockholm in the
beginning of the 1960's. At an exhibition in 1964 at Karlsson
Gallery his imagery upset the public so much that the gallery
immediately became the trendiest place for young artists in Stockholm.

In 1968, he created another scandal, when the film "Monument" was televised
in most European countries. For a couple of years, Ture Sjolander was celebrated
in France, Italy, Great Britain and the USA. In Sweden there was a lot of
jealousy. The Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Sweden, to name a
few, bought his works, but the techniques he worked with were expensive and
after a few years, he found himself without resources. Instead he started to
work with celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin and Greta
Garbo. They taught him that exile  mental and/or physical - is the only way to
escape destruction for a creative genius. He moved to Australia.

Ture Sjolander's works include photos, films, books, articles, textiles,
tv-programs, video-installations, happenings, sculptures and paintings  all
scattered around the Globe. Tracing will be a challenging and exciting task for
a future detective/biographer and web-archaeologist's.

But mostly, his work consists of a life of questioning and creation. This is
what sets him aside as one of the great artists of the 20th century.

Another forerunner in the art world, the internationally celebrated Swedish
composer Ralph Lundsten, says in an interview in the magazine SEX, 5, 2004: "In
those days (the 19th century), a painting could create a revolution.
Today people look idly at all the thousands of exhibitions that there are. Hmm.
Oh, really. How clever he is, and they yawn If I were a visual artist, and if
my ambition was to create something new, I would devote myself to the
possibilities of the computer."

In 1974,
Sherman Price of Rutt Electrophysics, wrote to the Swedish
Television Company (SVT): "Video Synthesis is becoming a prominent technique in
TV production here in the United States, and I think it will be interesting to
give credit to your broadcasting system and personnel for achieving this
historic invention."

He was referring to Ture Sjolander's revolutionary work in the 1960's. No one
at the SVT could at that time imagine the importance that this innovation would
have for television, and Sweden therefore lost a lead position in the
computer-development (later called IT) business.

Amongst the younger generation of computer animators, few know that they have
a Swedish predecessor. Many engineers were probably working away in their
cellars in those days, trying to do the same thing, but Sjolander was the first
person to show his results on the air. If any of you would like to have a look
at the Godfather of animation, you can find a good glimpse of him by googling.
Today, he has a fascinating web-presence.

He did not seek to patent his inventions and he has made no money from it.
However, he has made it to the history books as one of the great precursors of
art - and perhaps also of technology - of the 20th century.

For the past decades, Ture Sjolander has mostly lived in Australia, but he has
also worked in Papua New Guinea and China.

After a couple of decades of silence, in the spring of 2004, Sjolander's
groundbreaking work was shown at Fylkingen, an avant guard media and music hide
out in Stockholm

In September/October 2004, some of his recent paintings are to be exhibited
at the Gallery
Svenshog outside of Lund, Sweden. This was to commemorate the
forty years that have gone by since his last (scandalous) exhibition at Lunds
Konsthall. Many artists take a pleasure in provoking the established art world.
Ture
Sjolander also provokes the rest of the world.